arXiv subjects

Jiansheng Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Jiansheng Yang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Explicit Factorization of $x^{p+1}-1$ over $\mathbb{Z}_{p^e}$: A Structural Approach via Dickson Polynomials

Let $p$ be an odd prime. The factorization of the polynomial $x^{p+1}-1$ over the integer residue ring $\mathbb{Z}_{p^e}$ is pivotal for constructing cyclic codes with Hermitian symmetry, a critical resource for Linear Complementary Dual (LCD) codes and Entanglement-Assisted Quantum Error-Correcting Codes (EAQECC). Traditionally, lifting factorizations relies on the generic Hensel's Lemma, masking the underlying algebraic structure. In this paper, we establish a structural isomorphism between the lifting process and the roots of a special auxiliary polynomial $V(x)$, unveiling a deterministic link to Dickson polynomials. Based on this theory, we develop \texttt{Dickson-Engine}, a linear-time algorithm ($O(ep)$) that outperforms standard libraries by orders of magnitude. Applying this engine to $\mathbb{Z}_{169}$, we explicitly construct a family of classical LCD codes of length $n=182$ via the isometric Gray map. Our search reveals codes with parameters (e.g., $[182, 1, 168]_{13}$ and $[182, 2, 144]_{13}$) that are \textbf{near-optimal} with respect to the theoretical Griesmer Bound. Notably, we discover a ``robustness plateau'' starting from non-trivial dimensions ($k=4$), where the minimum distance remains stable ($d=120$) even as the dimension triples ($k=4 \rightarrow 12$). These codes provide exceptional resources for post-quantum cryptography and quantum error correction without entanglement consumption ($c=0$).

cs.IT↗

arXiv2026

Learning Expressive Random Feature Models via Parametrized Activations

The random feature (RF) method is a powerful kernel approximation technique, but it typically uses fixed activation functions, limiting its adaptability across diverse tasks. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the Random Feature Model with Learnable Activation Functions (RFLAF), a novel statistical model that parameterizes activation functions as weighted sums of basis functions within the random feature framework. Examples of basis functions include radial basis functions (RBFs), spline functions, polynomials, and so forth. For theoretical results, we consider RBFs as representative basis functions. We start with a single RBF as the activation, and then extend the results to multiple RBFs, demonstrating that RF models with a learnable activation component substantially expand the represented function space. We provide estimates on the required number of samples and random features to achieve low excess risk. In our experiments, we test RFLAF with three types of bases: radial basis functions, spline functions and polynomials. Experimental results show that RFLAFs with RBFs and splines consistently outperform other RF models, where RBFs are three times more computationally efficient than splines. We then unfreeze the first-layer parameters and retrain the models, validating the expressivity advantage of learnable activation components on regular two-layer neural networks. Our work provides a deeper understanding of learnable activation components within modern neural network architectures.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Explicit Factorization of $X^n-1$ over $\mathbb{Z}_{p^e}$ via Cofactor-Free Single-Seed Hensel Lifting

We present a complete framework for the explicit factorization of $X^n-1$ over integer residue rings $\mathbb{Z}_{p^e}$ for arbitrary $n$ with $\gcd(n, p)=1$. Classical approaches face fundamental bottlenecks: polynomial Hensel lifting requires updating global cofactors (scaling with $n$), while direct multivariate Newton--Hensel iteration on the factor coefficients requires Jacobian inversion (scaling exponentially as $O(p^{(m-1)^2})$ per layer due to zero-divisors, where $m$ is the coset dimension). Our framework eliminates both bottlenecks through three contributions: (1)~the \emph{Ideal Derivation Modulo Principle}, which characterizes all factor coefficients as roots of a multivariate Dickson polynomial ideal derived via modular remainder extraction; (2)~a \emph{cofactor-free Hensel lift} that elevates a single seed factor from $\mathbb{F}_p$ to $\mathbb{Z}_{p^e}$ using a cached polynomial inverse computed once over $\mathbb{F}_p$; and (3)~a \emph{dual-track coefficient reconstruction} mechanism that recovers all remaining factors from the lifted seed's trace array via MED-based coset dispatch, with Newton--Girard inversion as the primary path and quotient-ring Gaussian elimination as an unconditional fallback when $p \leq m$. Empirical evaluation confirms the theoretical grand total algebraic complexity of $O(n + m^3 \log p + e \cdot m^2)$ for explicitly factoring $X^n-1$ over $\mathbb{Z}_{p^e}$, validating the near-constant per-layer lifting cost $O(m^2)$ to depths exceeding $e = 1000$. The framework yields speedups of $445\times$ (including runtime auto-seeding overhead) over SageMath's C-backed FLINT/Pari engine and $33.5\times$ over the V1 scalar lift.

cs.SC↗

arXiv2025

Accelerated Distributional Temporal Difference Learning with Linear Function Approximation

In this paper, we study the finite-sample statistical rates of distributional temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. The purpose of distributional TD learning is to estimate the return distribution of a discounted Markov decision process for a given policy. Previous works on statistical analysis of distributional TD learning focus mainly on the tabular case. We first consider the linear function approximation setting and conduct a fine-grained analysis of the linear-categorical Bellman equation. Building on this analysis, we further incorporate variance reduction techniques in our new algorithms to establish tight sample complexity bounds independent of the support size $K$ when $K$ is large. Our theoretical results imply that, when employing distributional TD learning with linear function approximation, learning the full distribution of the return function from streaming data is no more difficult than learning its expectation. This work provide new insights into the statistical efficiency of distributional reinforcement learning algorithms.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2025

On the Generalization Properties of Learning the Random Feature Models with Learnable Activation Functions

This paper studies the generalization properties of a recently proposed kernel method, the Random Feature models with Learnable Activation Functions (RFLAF). By applying a data-dependent sampling scheme for generating features, we provide by far the sharpest bounds on the required number of features for learning RFLAF in both the regression and classification tasks. We provide a unified theorem that describes the complexity of the feature number $s$, and discuss the results for the plain sampling scheme and the data-dependent leverage weighted scheme. Through weighted sampling, the bound on $s$ in the MSE loss case is improved from $Ω(1/ε^2)$ to $\tildeΩ((1/ε)^{1/t})$ in general $(t\geq 1)$, and even to $Ω(1)$ when the Gram matrix has a finite rank. For the Lipschitz loss case, the bound is improved from $Ω(1/ε^2)$ to $\tildeΩ((1/ε^2)^{1/t})$. To learn the weighted RFLAF, we also propose an algorithm to find an approximate kernel and then apply the leverage weighted sampling. Empirical results show that the weighted RFLAF achieves the same performances with a significantly fewer number of features compared to the plainly sampled RFLAF, validating our theories and the effectiveness of this method.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

A Nyström Method for Scattering by a Two-layered Medium with a Rough Boundary

This paper is concerned with problems of scattering of time-harmonic acoustic waves by a two-layered medium with a non-locally perturbed boundary (called a rough boundary in this paper) in two dimensions, where a Dirichlet or impedance boundary condition is imposed on the boundary. The two-layered medium is composed of two unbounded media with different physical properties and the interface between the two media is considered to be a planar surface. We formulate the scattering problems considered as boundary value problems and prove the result of the well-posedness of each boundary value problem by utilizing the integral equation method associated with the two-layered Green function. Moreover, we develop a Nyström method for numerically solving the boundary value problems considered, based on the proposed integral equation formulations. We establish the convergence results of the Nyström method with the convergence rates depending on the smoothness of the rough boundary. It is worth noting that in establishing the well-posedness of the boundary value problems as well as the convergence results of the Nyström method, an essential role is played by the investigation of the asymptotic properties of the two-layered Green function for small and large arguments. Finally, numerical experiments are carried out to show the effectiveness of the Nyström method.

math.NA↗

arXiv2023

Uniform far-field asymptotics of the two-layered Green function in 2D and application to wave scattering in a two-layered medium

In this paper, we establish new results for the uniform far-field asymptotics of the two-layered Green function (together with its derivatives) in 2D in the frequency domain. To the best of our knowledge, our results are the sharpest yet obtained. The steepest descent method plays an important role in the proofs of our results. Further, as an application of our new results, we derive the uniform far-field asymptotics of the scattered field to the acoustic scattering problem by buried obstacles in a two-layered medium with a locally rough interface. The results obtained in this paper provide a theoretical foundation for our recent work, where direct imaging methods have been developed to image the locally rough interface from phaseless total-field data or phased far-field data at a fixed frequency. It is believed that the results obtained in this paper will also be useful on its own right.

math.AP↗

arXiv2023

Balance, Imbalance, and Rebalance: Understanding Robust Overfitting from a Minimax Game Perspective

Adversarial Training (AT) has become arguably the state-of-the-art algorithm for extracting robust features. However, researchers recently notice that AT suffers from severe robust overfitting problems, particularly after learning rate (LR) decay. In this paper, we explain this phenomenon by viewing adversarial training as a dynamic minimax game between the model trainer and the attacker. Specifically, we analyze how LR decay breaks the balance between the minimax game by empowering the trainer with a stronger memorization ability, and show such imbalance induces robust overfitting as a result of memorizing non-robust features. We validate this understanding with extensive experiments, and provide a holistic view of robust overfitting from the dynamics of both the two game players. This understanding further inspires us to alleviate robust overfitting by rebalancing the two players by either regularizing the trainer's capacity or improving the attack strength. Experiments show that the proposed ReBalanced Adversarial Training (ReBAT) can attain good robustness and does not suffer from robust overfitting even after very long training. Code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/ReBAT.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Near-Optimal Last-iterate Convergence of Policy Optimization in Zero-sum Polymatrix Markov games

Computing approximate Nash equilibria in multi-player general-sum Markov games is a computationally intractable task. However, multi-player Markov games with certain cooperative or competitive structures might circumvent this intractability. In this paper, we focus on multi-player zero-sum polymatrix Markov games, where players interact in a pairwise fashion while remain overall competitive. To the best of our knowledge, we propose the first policy optimization algorithm called Entropy-Regularized Optimistic-Multiplicative-Weights-Update (ER-OMWU) for finding approximate Nash equilibria in finite-horizon zero-sum polymatrix Markov games with full information feedback. We provide last-iterate convergence guarantees for finding an $ε$-approximate Nash equilibrium within $\tilde{O}(1/ε)$ iterations, which is near-optimal compared to the optimal $O(1/ε)$ iteration complexity in two-player zero-sum Markov games, which is a degenerate case of zero-sum polymatrix games with only two players involved. Our algorithm combines the regularized and optimistic learning dynamics with separated smooth value update within a single loop, where players update strategies in a symmetric and almost uncoupled manner. It provides a natural dynamics for finding equilibria and is more probable to be adapted to a sample-efficient and fully decentralized implementation where only partial information feedback is available in the future.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2023

Direct imaging methods for reconstructing a locally rough interface from phaseless total-field data or phased far-field data

This paper is concerned with the problem of inverse scattering of time-harmonic acoustic plane waves by a two-layered medium with a locally rough interface in 2D. A direct imaging method is proposed to reconstruct the locally rough interface from the phaseless total-field data measured on the upper half of the circle with a large radius at a fixed frequency or from the phased far-field data measured on the upper half of the unit circle at a fixed frequency. The presence of the locally rough interface poses challenges in the theoretical analysis of the imaging methods. To address these challenges, a technically involved asymptotic analysis is provided for the relevant oscillatory integrals involved in the imaging methods, based mainly on the techniques and results in our recent work [L. Li, J. Yang, B. Zhang and H. Zhang, arXiv:2208.00456] on the uniform far-field asymptotics of the scattered field for acoustic scattering in a two-layered medium. Finally, extensive numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of our imaging algorithms.

math.NA↗

arXiv2023

A Message Passing Perspective on Learning Dynamics of Contrastive Learning

In recent years, contrastive learning achieves impressive results on self-supervised visual representation learning, but there still lacks a rigorous understanding of its learning dynamics. In this paper, we show that if we cast a contrastive objective equivalently into the feature space, then its learning dynamics admits an interpretable form. Specifically, we show that its gradient descent corresponds to a specific message passing scheme on the corresponding augmentation graph. Based on this perspective, we theoretically characterize how contrastive learning gradually learns discriminative features with the alignment update and the uniformity update. Meanwhile, this perspective also establishes an intriguing connection between contrastive learning and Message Passing Graph Neural Networks (MP-GNNs). This connection not only provides a unified understanding of many techniques independently developed in each community, but also enables us to borrow techniques from MP-GNNs to design new contrastive learning variants, such as graph attention, graph rewiring, jumpy knowledge techniques, etc. We believe that our message passing perspective not only provides a new theoretical understanding of contrastive learning dynamics, but also bridges the two seemingly independent areas together, which could inspire more interleaving studies to benefit from each other. The code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/Message-Passing-Contrastive-Learning.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Optimization-Induced Graph Implicit Nonlinear Diffusion

Due to the over-smoothing issue, most existing graph neural networks can only capture limited dependencies with their inherently finite aggregation layers. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new kind of graph convolution, called Graph Implicit Nonlinear Diffusion (GIND), which implicitly has access to infinite hops of neighbors while adaptively aggregating features with nonlinear diffusion to prevent over-smoothing. Notably, we show that the learned representation can be formalized as the minimizer of an explicit convex optimization objective. With this property, we can theoretically characterize the equilibrium of our GIND from an optimization perspective. More interestingly, we can induce new structural variants by modifying the corresponding optimization objective. To be specific, we can embed prior properties to the equilibrium, as well as introducing skip connections to promote training stability. Extensive experiments show that GIND is good at capturing long-range dependencies, and performs well on both homophilic and heterophilic graphs with nonlinear diffusion. Moreover, we show that the optimization-induced variants of our models can boost the performance and improve training stability and efficiency as well. As a result, our GIND obtains significant improvements on both node-level and graph-level tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Chaos is a Ladder: A New Theoretical Understanding of Contrastive Learning via Augmentation Overlap

Recently, contrastive learning has risen to be a promising approach for large-scale self-supervised learning. However, theoretical understanding of how it works is still unclear. In this paper, we propose a new guarantee on the downstream performance without resorting to the conditional independence assumption that is widely adopted in previous work but hardly holds in practice. Our new theory hinges on the insight that the support of different intra-class samples will become more overlapped under aggressive data augmentations, thus simply aligning the positive samples (augmented views of the same sample) could make contrastive learning cluster intra-class samples together. Based on this augmentation overlap perspective, theoretically, we obtain asymptotically closed bounds for downstream performance under weaker assumptions, and empirically, we propose an unsupervised model selection metric ARC that aligns well with downstream accuracy. Our theory suggests an alternative understanding of contrastive learning: the role of aligning positive samples is more like a surrogate task than an ultimate goal, and the overlapped augmented views (i.e., the chaos) create a ladder for contrastive learning to gradually learn class-separated representations. The code for computing ARC is available at https://github.com/zhangq327/ARC.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

A Unified Contrastive Energy-based Model for Understanding the Generative Ability of Adversarial Training

Adversarial Training (AT) is known as an effective approach to enhance the robustness of deep neural networks. Recently researchers notice that robust models with AT have good generative ability and can synthesize realistic images, while the reason behind it is yet under-explored. In this paper, we demystify this phenomenon by developing a unified probabilistic framework, called Contrastive Energy-based Models (CEM). On the one hand, we provide the first probabilistic characterization of AT through a unified understanding of robustness and generative ability. On the other hand, our unified framework can be extended to the unsupervised scenario, which interprets unsupervised contrastive learning as an important sampling of CEM. Based on these, we propose a principled method to develop adversarial learning and sampling methods. Experiments show that the sampling methods derived from our framework improve the sample quality in both supervised and unsupervised learning. Notably, our unsupervised adversarial sampling method achieves an Inception score of 9.61 on CIFAR-10, which is superior to previous energy-based models and comparable to state-of-the-art generative models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Piecewise-analytic interfaces with weakly singular points of arbitrary order always scatter

It is proved that an inhomogeneous medium whose boundary contains a weakly singular point of arbitrary order scatters every incoming wave. Similarly, a compactly supported source term with weakly singular points on the boundary always radiates acoustic waves. These results imply the absence of non-scattering energies and non-radiating sources in a domain that is not $C^\infty$-smooth. Local uniqueness results with a single far-field pattern are obtained for inverse source and inverse medium scattering problems. Our arguments provide a sufficient condition of the surface under which solutions to the Helmholtz equation admits no analytical continuation.

math.AP↗

arXiv2021

Dissecting the Diffusion Process in Linear Graph Convolutional Networks

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have attracted more and more attentions in recent years. A typical GCN layer consists of a linear feature propagation step and a nonlinear transformation step. Recent works show that a linear GCN can achieve comparable performance to the original non-linear GCN while being much more computationally efficient. In this paper, we dissect the feature propagation steps of linear GCNs from a perspective of continuous graph diffusion, and analyze why linear GCNs fail to benefit from more propagation steps. Following that, we propose Decoupled Graph Convolution (DGC) that decouples the terminal time and the feature propagation steps, making it more flexible and capable of exploiting a very large number of feature propagation steps. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed DGC improves linear GCNs by a large margin and makes them competitive with many modern variants of non-linear GCNs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Residual Relaxation for Multi-view Representation Learning

Multi-view methods learn representations by aligning multiple views of the same image and their performance largely depends on the choice of data augmentation. In this paper, we notice that some other useful augmentations, such as image rotation, are harmful for multi-view methods because they cause a semantic shift that is too large to be aligned well. This observation motivates us to relax the exact alignment objective to better cultivate stronger augmentations. Taking image rotation as a case study, we develop a generic approach, Pretext-aware Residual Relaxation (Prelax), that relaxes the exact alignment by allowing an adaptive residual vector between different views and encoding the semantic shift through pretext-aware learning. Extensive experiments on different backbones show that our method can not only improve multi-view methods with existing augmentations, but also benefit from stronger image augmentations like rotation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Reparameterized Sampling for Generative Adversarial Networks

Recently, sampling methods have been successfully applied to enhance the sample quality of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, in practice, they typically have poor sample efficiency because of the independent proposal sampling from the generator. In this work, we propose REP-GAN, a novel sampling method that allows general dependent proposals by REParameterizing the Markov chains into the latent space of the generator. Theoretically, we show that our reparameterized proposal admits a closed-form Metropolis-Hastings acceptance ratio. Empirically, extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our REP-GAN largely improves the sample efficiency and obtains better sample quality simultaneously.

stat.ML↗